There is a Beaufort wind scale chart on my desk, summoned from a classic sailing website and printed out as angry southerly fronts swept the mid-summer weekends and blighted hopes of holiday cruising.
Weather forecasting is a thankless task, I’m sure, but the Met Service’s windspeed predictions expressed in kilometres an hour had been annoying me for months.
For one thing, the numbers are nearly double what they would be in the traditional ‘knots’ of seafaring. Based on the ‘nautical mile’, equal to navigation’s ‘minutes’ of latitude and longitude, it is longer than a land mile but not so much that it interferes with seamanlike measurement.
The Beaufort scale has informed our civilisation’s several hundred years of ocean wind charts and trade routes. We ourselves sailed round the world in the 1970s, informed by wind charts collated over centuries that were rarely wrong.
A British admiral developed the Beaufort wind scale in1805 to help sailors estimate the winds from visual observations. The first three categories are from flat calm and light airs to Force Three windspeeds of up to 10 knots. Force Four is a moderate breeze of 11 to 16 knots with occasional white horses forming. “On land it raises dust and loose paper, small branches are moved, says my Windscale chattily.
A 20-knot wind is Force Five, a fresh breeze with consistent white horses. That’s between 30 and 40 kilometres per hour.
So not much sailing then, with the whitecaps of a Force Eight gale galloping at the lee shore of Te Huruhi Bay outside my front window, but at least a gulp of fresh air before tackling the glooming murk of national politics.
However, as New Year political commentators reviewed the first year of National’s coalition government, the message was strong and, to many of us, damning but finally out in the open.
The University of Auckland’s Dame Anne Salmond, New Zealander of the Year in 2013 and appointed to the Order of New Zealand, the highest honour in New Zealand’s royal honours system in 2020, pulled no punches.
“There are times when fiction anticipates life, and dystopian nightmares become real with radical libertarian ideologies now generating extreme inequality and ripping the social fabric of New Zealand,” she wrote in Newsroom.
“Who would have thought that in New Zealand, a relatively wealthy country that was once proudly egalitarian, a version of The Hunger Games would play out?
“That a government would cut thousands of jobs, deny desperate families emergency food grants, then announce that they are withdrawing support from charitable food banks?
“Or that in this situation, a prime minister who is “wealthy and sorted” would visit a food bank for a photo opportunity just before Christmas?
“What on earth was he thinking?”
Having lost its sense of decency and any ideas about how to run the country for all New Zealanders, the government coalition appears to have been captured by a fringe party of ‘libertarians’ that has, according to the Act Party’s own founder, Roger Douglas, lost its way, cutting taxes for the rich instead of the poor and at risk of sending the country bankrupt,” she said.
A blitzkrieg of policies had been affected by time constraints and a disdain for evidence, or more particularly, evidence that does not support legislative changes. All while public submissions and official advice were swept aside and democratic debate thwarted for policies that are not well-considered or evidence-based, said Dame Anne.
“We can’t survive two more years of this,” said Scoop’s political editor Gordon Campbell, who was similarly blunt.
Grim evidence is piling up about how bad finance minister Nicola Willis is at her job, he said. “Tax receipts are down, debt is higher, a fiscal surplus will now take longer to achieve. Wage growth is being predicted by Treasury to virtually flatline at one percent over the next four years, in an economy that in per capita terms is unlikely to begin growing again until 2026.
“Isn’t it time she stepped up? We have opened two advent calendars since she got the job of running the economy.” he said, dismissing a broad range of excuses. “Originally, the recession that we are now experiencing was deliberately engineered by the Reserve Bank, via its OCR-led determination to snuff out a temporary surge in inflation.”
“This surge was not caused by an allegedly spendthrift Hipkins administration and, in the doldrums of the recession, it was Willis who chose to then impose draconian cuts to jobs and spending that have served only to plunge the economy deeper into recession and put the likes of the Wellington retail economy in the ICU ward.”
Basic points appeared to have eluded Willis, he said. “People don’t spend up large when they’ve just lost their jobs, or are fearful of doing so. When the state stops building, hiring and investing, the economy stalls.”
Starved of consumer spending and state investment, our economy and productivity is indeed showing signs of foundering. Caught and in the eye of an unfamiliar storm, we need to chart a course out of it and jettison the dross. Quickly.
• Liz Waters
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